UK EXCLUSIVE: Barcelona benchmarked

 

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By David Fearon

Posted on 3 Oct 2007 at 10:41

Interestingly, even though the power consumption of the system fitted with a single Barcelona is lower than the dual, dual-core setup, the raw performance deficit means that the old setup is more efficient, with a performance-per-watt factor of 4.38 to the Barcelona's 2.54. In other words, even though the system with a single Barcelona fitted uses less power, the fact that it took significantly longer to complete the test means it used more energy overall.

Four cores for free

The situation does change when it comes to a more realistic scenario, though. We directly replaced the two dual-core Opterons with two quad-core Barcelonas, taking the Boston system from its previous maximum of four cores up to a new complement of eight. In this configuration, the Barcelona Opterons thrash the old-generation parts, for instance giving a 33-second time to first frame in our render test in comparison to 48 seconds with the old processors.

And, true to AMD's promise, the total platform power consumption didn't rise, with our Supermicro test rig consuming around 210W during testing in both before and after configurations. This gives a performance-per-watt factor of 4.28 for the old setup, but a far superior 6.36 for the new. The good news on the power front continues, since the idle power of the new parts is lower than the old: the Supermicro consumed 157W at idle populated with a pair of 2214s, but only around 138W with a pair of 2346HEs. That's effectively four extra cores for free as far as power is concerned.

Round one: a mixed success

So the initial results for Barcelona are mixed: as far as power consumption goes, processor-for-processor replacement will certainly increase efficiency and performance-per-watt. We're a little underwhelmed by its absolute performance levels, though, and that's before we've pitted it against comparably priced Intel Xeon parts, or in a virtualisation environment - the next round of benchmarking that we'll be doing.

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